> When something is large and light, the consumer view is that it is cheaply made.

That depends on the context. If it also looks cheap and squeaks when you pick it up, the impression is that it's made of junk plastic rather than the wrought iron and solid gold presumably being used by the competition.

Whereas if you can give the feel that the thing is from the future with titanium alloys and carbon fiber (even if it's really still just aluminum and plastic), people get a different impression.

I believe that impression comes from the laptop feeling “hollow” more than it does from it being light.

This could probably be engineered around by doing things like holding the battery up against the laptop’s palm rest with a rim of TPU or similar between the battery and the case to deaden vibrations and make it feel more “solid”.

Haven’t some products been found to have weights inside just to make them feel more premium?

Yup. The most prominent I can remember are the Beats By Dre headphones, where about a third of the weight is from metal parts that are either purely decorative, or whose functionality does not at all depend on being made of metal, based on a 2020 teardown [0,1].

[0]: https://beneinstein.medium.com/how-it-s-made-series-beats-by... [1]: https://beneinstein.com/how-it-s-made-series-yup-our-beats-w...

Yeah. Dense = quality (and thus expense) is something people think.

I don’t know if it’s innate or learned, but I would certainly like to.

My theory is that this is a sense that people picked up on thanks to the outpouring of various cheap electronics from China from the 90s onward. They tended to be enclosed in thin plastic shells that were sometimes larger than necessary in attempt to increase visible differentiation from competitors sharing the same internals. This made them feel hollow, and people associated that feeling with cheapness.

By contrast, high end electronics brands like Sony used thicker enclosures that were made with a thicker, less resonant plastic or even metal and focused on miniaturization which naturally lent itself to more dense products. People then associated that denseness with quality.

I suspect you’re probably right, but also that it goes back further.

Think well-made solid mixer, like an old KitchenAid stand mixer, versus a similar thing made of plastic. It wouldn’t be anywhere near as heavy. And it’s obviously much cheaper and wouldn’t feel as solid.

I guess I’m with you that it sort of came from the plastic age maybe? I wonder if it was really much of a thing before that.

then again it’s also easy to tell that a solid oak desk, or some other heavy wood, is better than something made of press-board or balsawood. so maybe it is even older.

In cases where there’s no component that would naturally add weight in the right place, yes.

That very much depends on the product type.

No one pedalling a heavy bicycle up hill ever thought it was better made than a lighter one, even if it was.

It’s almost first thing people do when looking at a bike is pick it up for weight.

Heavier aero bikes can be fast. Heavier 4-pot brakes can work better but still we notice the weight and want lighter.

Of these laptops 95% are not going to consumers but to enterprise users so who cares what consumers think?

This. The 5% that go to home users is even shittier. Profit is key. Expensive R&D and expensive materials hurt profits.